- ICC unseals arrest warrant for a prominent Philippine senator over drug war killings under Duterte
Source: Yahoo! News
“The International Criminal Court unsealed Monday an arrest warrant for a prominent Philippine senator linked to the deadly ‘war on drugs’ overseen by ex-President Rodrigo Duterte, which allegedly involved the extrajudicial killings of suspects. The warrant, originally issued confidentially in November, charges Ronald Marapon dela Rosa, a former Philippine national police chief and a Duterte ally, with the crime against humanity of murder of ‘no less than 32 persons’ allegedly committed between July 2016 and the end of April 2018. Duterte, dela Rosa and other police officials have denied authorizing the killings of drug suspects, who, they said, were shot dead after allegedly threatening law enforcers. Duterte openly and repeatedly threatened drug suspects with death while in office.” (05/11/26)
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/icc-unseals-arrest-warrant-former-150533606.html
- Shein accuses Temu of “industrial scale” copyright breaches in UK legal battle
Source: Yahoo! Finance
“Online fast-fashion platform Shein accused Temu of copyright infringement ‘on an industrial scale,’ while Temu countered that Shein is using litigation to stifle competition, as a trial opened at London’s High Court on Monday. The case is part of a global legal battle between the fast-growing rivals, with potential implications for platform practices, supplier relationships and the enforcement of intellectual property rights across global e-commerce. Shein alleges Temu used thousands of its photos to advertise copies of Shein’s own-brand clothing on its website, to ‘piggy-back’ on a more established competitor. … Temu – owned by PDD Holdings – has counter-claimed, seeking damages after it had to remove thousands of product listings when Shein obtained an injunction.” (05/11/26)
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/shein-accuses-temu-industrial-scale-121251120.html
- UK: MP backs down from Starmer challenge but urges him to go by September
Source: The Guardian [UK]
“Catherine West, the Labour MP who announced a challenge to Keir Starmer’s leadership, has changed course to say she instead wants the prime minister to set a timetable of September for his departure. West, the MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet and a former Foreign Office minister, announced on Saturday that she would seek to gather the 81 Labour MPs’ names needed to formally challenge Starmer, saying this was just a device to tempt others to stand and that she did not wish to take over. In a statement released after Starmer’s speech on Monday morning in which he said he would fight on despite terrible results for Labour in elections last week, West called for an orderly process for Starmer to depart.” (05/11/26)
- Are We all Libertarian-Adjacent Now?
Source: Chris’s Substack
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra“[O]ne implication of [Matt] Zwolinski’s work is that there is no single, coherent libertarian project to speak of, that libertarianism is a Big Tent, which includes many, sometimes conflicting projects offering substantially different interpretations of the world and starkly different proposals on how to identify and resolve the social problems they encounter. How adjacent these proposals are to libertarianism is a key issue here because when the definition or even description of a term becomes so fluid that it encompasses virtually everything, it ultimately signifies nothing. This isn’t about asking those in libertarian and adjacent spaces to hand in their club cards. It’s a question of how ‘adjacency’ can morph into ideological complicity and outright support for the very power structures that most libertarians have sought to dismantle.” (05/11/26)
https://chrismatthewsciabarra.substack.com/p/are-we-all-libertarian-adjacent-now
- An Ode to Low-Skilled Workers
Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan“Social Desirability Bias aside, ‘Low-skilled workers are terrible’ is absolute lunacy. Most obviously, we’d starve without low-skilled workers, because they grow almost all of our food. The vast majority of construction and infrastructure workers lack college degrees, and without them, we’d be living in tents. If we’re lucky, because tents are made by low-skilled workers, too. … if the economy had to lose either Jeff Bezos or his driver, we’d be better off with Bezos. But the economy is, fortunately, not a Trolley Problem. We almost never choose between Bezos and his driver, or between any high-skilled worker and any low-skilled worker.” (05/11/26)
https://www.betonit.ai/p/an-ode-to-low-skilled-workers-version
- Trump’s “Unacceptable” Answer
Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison“The president curtly rejected another Iranian proposal yesterday: ‘President Trump on Sunday rejected the latest offer from Iran to end the war with the United States, declaring that it was ‘TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.” As many observers now acknowledge, the U.S. has lost the war. Trump cannot bring himself to accept that he is responsible for that defeat. He appears to have believed that he could win a great victory over Iran in a matter of days, and he can’t cope with the reality of his monumental failure. … the U.S. should jump at the chance to extricate itself from the mess it has created before the damage to the global economy gets far worse. It may not exactly be a return to the status quo ante, but that option isn’t available. This is probably as good of an offer as the U.S. is likely to get.” (05/11/26)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/trumps-unacceptable-answer
- The Problem with Liberal Empire
Source: Law & Liberty
by Christopher Coyne“If Enlightenment thinkers and Hayek are correct, then the government’s projection of power intended to achieve order will crowd out and potentially destroy emergent orders. In this case, what are presumed to be the means of bringing about order are actually a source of disorder. In addition, the association of order with top-down state control creates a false sense of overconfidence in technocratic solutions, encouraging more, rather than less, government intervention. Failures are not viewed as issues with the abuse of human reason, but rather as failures to plan well enough. … Liberal empires do not stay liberal.” (05/11/26)
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-problem-with-liberal-empire/
- Why Does America Keep Testing Failed “Decapitation” Strategies?
Source: Libertarian Institute
by José Niño“The United States has long operated under a seductive strategic fantasy. Remove the leader of an adversary organization, whether a drug cartel, a terrorist group, or a sovereign state, and that organization will collapse, enabling American interests to fill the resulting vacuum. However, decades of academic literature, hard empirical data from Mexico’s drug war, and the lived consequences of America’s post 9/11 targeted killing campaigns all tell a damning story many in the DC ruling class refuse to acknowledge. Decapitation strategies are, at best, tactically satisfying and strategically hollow. At worst, they escalate violence, radicalize successors, and produce precisely the instability they were designed to prevent. The ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran represents the most ambitious test of this doctrine in history. The results so far are deeply troubling.” (05/11/26)
- The Revolution in Direct Democracy in America
Source: Town Hall
by Barry Poulson“The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizens the right to petition their government. Petitioning government is part of our DNA. We benefited from British institutions of direct democracy that can be traced back to the Magna Carta. In the New England colonies direct democracy was the foundation for government, citizens could petition their government in town meetings and annual election ballots. At the national level, petitioning Congress peaked in the 19th century but has declined since then. In the 19th century disenfranchised citizens, including women before suffrage, free blacks, and indigenous peoples were able to petition the federal government to address issues and enact reforms that Congress was unwilling to initiate. The decline in direct democracy over the past century is due to several factors.” (05/11/26)
- Europe Shrugs Off Trump’s Latest Threats
Source: Foreign Policy
by Rachel Rizzo“When U.S. President Donald Trump reentered office last year, European leaders felt that familiar sense of dread. And indeed, Trump launched back into his first-term habit of harping on Europe for everything from defense spending to trade imbalances. Vice President J.D. Vance turned the knife even deeper with a speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, blaming Europe for its own demise for things such as government impingement upon free speech and uncontrolled immigration. European leaders, for their part, initially responded to these provocations with a familiar mix of panic, unease, and warnings that the trans-Atlantic relationship was doomed. But Trump’s latest threats against European countries — in response to their refusal to go all in on Washington’s war with Iran — don’t seem to be eliciting the same response from the continent as before.” (05/11/26)
- Quantum Vibe, 05/11/26
Source: Big Head Press
by Scott BieserCartoon. (05/11/26)
- How Closing the Strait of Hormuz Has Sparked a Wider Energy Debate in Europe
Source: The Nation
by Stanley Reed“For the second time in less than five years, a politically driven energy crunch is buffeting Europe, leading to soul-searching about how to avoid these damaging episodes in the future. In 2022, Russia, while invading Ukraine, slashed natural gas supplies to some European countries …. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key conduit for oil and natural gas shipments from the Persian Gulf region, means that Europeans face the threat of disruption of energy supplies, including aviation fuel, and a rise in prices that were already high. … For some European politicians and clean energy executives, the lessons from these shocks are clear. Europe, they say, must accelerate already robust efforts to shift to clean energy technologies like wind and solar power not only to mitigate climate change but, increasingly, to avoid blackmail and preserve independence.” (05/11/26)
- Government backfires
Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie“The UK government’s imposition of VAT on schools will raise less money than they calculated, and might well cost them money. Private schools now charge VAT at 20% on fees, and the government collects that revenue. On paper, this looks like a straightforward tax windfall. But several offsetting effects erode or potentially reverse the gain. Families who can no longer afford fees pushed up by 20% are withdrawing their children and placing them in state schools, which the government must fund. Estimates run as high as one in ten leaving private education. Each additional state school pupil costs roughly £7,000-£8,000 per year. If enough pupils switch, this spending can outweigh VAT receipts. Private schools, now VAT-registered, can reclaim VAT on their own purchases such as building work, supplies, etc., something they couldn’t do before. This reduces the net VAT take.” (05/11/26)
- Trumpland Is a Man’s World: Now You See Them… Now You Don’t
Source: TomDispatch
by Karen Greenberg“It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington — or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever to hold that title. Weeks later, also in a social media post, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, the third woman ever to serve as head of the Department of Justice. While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both — no surprise — were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece, Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer.” (05/10/26)
- Reason Roundtable, 05/11/26
Source: Reason
“Gavin Newsom’s Free Diaper Disaster.” (05/11/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/05/11/gavin-newsoms-free-diaper-disaster/
- Rising, 05/11/26
Source: The Hill
“Robby Soave gives his radar on a lawsuit filed against The New York Times, accusing the paper of discriminating against a white male employee.” (05/11/26)
- Free Speech Future, episode 3
Source: Expression
“What the history of tech censorship — from video games to social media — can teach us about our current moment. What worked, what didn’t, and where we go from here.” (05/11/26)
https://expression.fire.org/p/free-speech-future-episode-iii-cycles
- Neon Liberalism, episode 73
Source: Liberal Currents
“Samantha is joined by Elizabeth Wilkins, president of the Roosevelt Institute, to discuss the economic debate that’s roiling the Democratic Party–whether to lean in to Republican slopulism about tax cuts, or to embrace broad social programs funded by a broad tax base.” (05/11/26)